


Enough of Hate

by Mynameisdoubleg



Category: BattleTech: MechWarrior, Classic Battletech (Tabletop RPG)
Genre: 3025, BattleTech - Freeform, ComStar, Marik, Mechwarrior - Freeform, Steiner - Freeform, classic, mercenary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:53:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27603061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mynameisdoubleg/pseuds/Mynameisdoubleg
Summary: If everyone wants peace, then why is it so hard to achieve? In a galaxy mired in a series of centuries-long wars, on a planet wracked by rebellion, two mercenary units play a deadly game of cat and mouse even as a ComStar Adept attempts to broker peace between the two sides.





	Enough of Hate

Mortimer’s Woods  
Pencader  
Lyran Commonwealth  
5 May 3026

The last of the embers were dying. Smoke drifted through the bone-thin trees and trailed pale grey fingers across the gaping sky. Carrion birds wheeled high overhead, dipping and rising on the hot air currents. In the cockpit of his Crusader, Justin Crowe watched their flight, as though—like an ancient soothsayer—trying to divine the future in the endless patterns.  
Circle, dip, rise, circle.  
The village at the edge of the forest had never been big and likely would never have grown any bigger, but the enemy had burned it to the ground just the same. This was a pattern Justin needed no help in reading. Homes smashed, demolished, flattened under heavy tread. A line of broken trees pointed where the attackers had gone, clearer than any oracle.  
“The Game Over Gang?” asked Buddy Chen, his orange and grey Centurion parked at the other end of the village. Michelle “Micky” White’s Vindicator and Lucius “Luscious” Jackson’s Enforcer stood guard on either flank.  
“Does look that way,” Justin agreed.  
“We going after them JC?”  
Circle, dip, rise, circle. “No, no point,” he said at last. “They’re a day ahead of us, at least. We’d never catch them.”  
“Lord Percy’ll be pissed.”  
Circle, dip, rise. “Lucky he isn’t here, then.” Circle.

Chinon City

An aide knocked and stuck his head around the door. “Lord Baron Percy has arrived, Precentor,” he said, and ducked back out when she nodded.  
Precentor Faith Beaufort watched the flickering ember on the tip of her cigarette. The smoke looped and curled in the still air, circling her head like an insubstantial halo. She sighed and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray on her desk, giving it a final sharp twist to kill its flame.  
She wasn’t looking forward to this. The Baron and the revolutionary, their hands locked around one another’s throats for the last decade. So much easier just to let them hurl themselves over the precipice and into barbarism.   
Certainly, that was the direction most of the planet was going, as warring nobles and insurgents reduced their world into a carcass, while scores of mercenary companies circled like vultures, angling to tear off a chunk for themselves. It had taken the utter annihilation of one such state in a guided meteor strike to knock even a few of them off this endless carousel of destruction.  
Give them half a chance and they’d clamber back on, she sighed. Probably a waste of effort. Ah well, it was her own fault for agreeing to host the talks.  
She crushed the urge for another cigarette as brutally as she had the one in the ashtray, stood and smoothed the wrinkles from her white robe, then swept through the antechamber and down the corridor in purposeful strides, her aide trailing after.  
“What about Commandant Neville?” she barked as she walked, not bothering to look around.  
“He, ah, seems to have been, ah—”  
“Well?”  
“He says he’s been, ah, delayed, Precentor. Says he will be 30 minutes late.”  
“A likely story,” she muttered to herself. Then, to the aide, “Inform Neville he will be here in 15 minutes, or he will pay double rates on every transmission for a year.”  
“Yes, Precentor.”  
They halted in front of a pair tall, white, gilded doors, the ComStar symbol embossed in gold. Beaufort turned to the aide. “Time to smooth some ruffled feathers. How do I look?” She held up a hand before he could speak. “Never mind. Just get Neville here. Go.”  
She turned back, set her face in her most diplomatic smile, gripped both doorknobs, and pushed the doors open. “Lord Baron Percy, welcome.”

Mortimer’s Woods

Justin insisted that they bury the dead.  
Chen protested. Every minute they stayed was another minute the Game Over Gang could be doing the same thing to another village. They couldn’t do a proper job, so someone would have to come back and dig the bodies up again anyway. It was a waste of time.  
Justin listened, agreed, and kept digging. The other three were off-worlders, but Pencader was his home.  
Jackson’s Enforcer had no hands, White’s Vindicator and Chen’s Centurion only one each, so it fell to Justin to do most of the work. Great shovel-bladed fingers tore up the earth in long clods. Into each hole he placed, as delicately as he could, whatever battered and bloody remains the BattleMechs had left. Men, women, children. The children were the worst.  
It was a feudal tactic for a neo-feudal society. The chevauchée, they called it back in the Hundred Years’ War, a terror raid designed to economically weaken your opponent and undermine the people’s loyalty by showing how defenseless they were.   
Giving it a fancy name didn’t make the reality of it any better, though.  
These raids had been going on back and forth between the Game Over Gang and themselves for the better part of 10 years. They’d raided lands held by the Commandant, and chased the Gang on Percy’s. Justin knew it wasn’t the first time civilians had died in this endless feud and it wouldn’t be the last, there would be others. So many others. There were children, innocent children, murdered for a cause they couldn’t even understand much less take a side in but murdered just the same, murdered without pity, without reason, without justice just like his boy, they’d taken his boy, his only boy, and he was uprooting a tree, an ancient oak tree in his ’Mech’s hand and smashing it, smashing it on the ground, smashing it to kindling, meter-size splinters spinning away, smashing this great oak to pieces and he stared at the mangled trunk not knowing what he’d done—  
There was silence, broken only by his own labored breathing.   
“Uh, maybe you can rest a spell JC,” said Chen. “Michelle and I can do the rest.”

Chinon City

“It’s an insult,” Lord Baron Percy thundered, grey moustache trembling.  
Beaufort winced internally. The man had a voice like a crow with a particularly nasty chest infection.   
Percy sat in a high pseudo-leather chair on one side of the U-shaped conference table, flanked by generals festooned with medals and functionaries in somber black. On the opposite side, the chairs sat conspicuously empty.   
“Well, obviously,” Beaufort replied calmly from her seat at the base of the U. “It is a petty attempt to control the flow of the negotiations. I trust you have seen through his transparent ploy and will not be baited into hasty words or actions?”  
“Hasty?” Percy seethed. “Do you know that even as we sit here his men are raiding my lands, killing my people, burning my fields? Do not talk to me of hasty, Precentor.”  
The doors were flung open to admit Commandant Neville, a short man built like a wrestler, exuding energy like static, like ball lightning. “Precentor Beaufort, you must forgive me,” his grin positively shone. “Traffic on the way here was simply murder.”  
A dangerous man, she thought, with his restless ambition and bottomless appetite. When the last star failed and the universe went black, Beaufort was sure men like Neville would find a way to profit.  
Lord Percy was already on his feet, spluttering, before being brought to a halt by the Precentor’s raised hand. She regarded Neville coolly, the way one would a wayward child. “Commandant Neville,” she began, voice level. “It is with great reluctance that ComStar has agreed to act as an intermediary in the negotiations between your two parties. I had to personally insist. However, should we feel either of you is not negotiating in good faith, we will have no hesitation in withdrawing our services. No loss to ComStar, though potentially embarrassing for me personally as the one who agreed to the whole thing in the first place. Are you trying to embarrass me, Neville?”  
“Why Precentor,” Neville looked aggrieved. “I can’t think what I could have done to make you—”  
“Yes or no, Commandant Neville,” she cut him off. “Are you trying to embarrass me?”   
“Of course not.”  
“Good. Sit.” She indicated his chair, then flicked her gaze to Lord Percy, still standing. “You too.”  
Neville shrugged amiably, as though it was no great matter to him. Percy nodded, stiff, just once. The two eyed each other, then both sank slowly into their seats, watching wearily, ensuring they both sat down at the same time.  
“Good. Now gentlemen,” the Precentor said, arching her fingers before her on the table. “For the past ten years, you have borne the cost of war. Today, we will see if you are willing to pay the price of peace.”

Mortimer’s Woods  
6 May 3026

Dawn came slowly, faint light leaking into the world through a heavy mantle of clouds. They ate silently in the pale light, looked around once more at the empty shell that had once been the village, and mounted their machines.  
In the cockpit of Justin’s Crusader there was a holo emitter, bolted to the control panel, a small round puck of black polymer. He pressed a stud at its base, and watched the face flicker into life. A high forehead, big blue eyes, a wide-eyed grin. Justin watched the holo silently for a minute, both hands clenched in tight fists held beneath his chin, as if to prevent himself from speaking.  
“I got movement, JC, something small but fast, coming down the road,” Chen’s voice brought Justin out of his reverie. He glanced at his own sensors, then up at his HUD. Sure enough, his computer painted a red dot, now hidden from sight behind a fold in the ground, estimated weight between 100 and 200kg, careering down the road at over 100kph.   
“I see it,” Justin confirmed. “Too small to do much even if it’s hostile, but let’s play it safe. Michelle, pop up a little, see if you can get a visual.”  
Michelle White’s Vindicator fired its jump jets, catapulting 100 meters straight up into the air on columns of superheated air, where it hung for an instant, before falling back, cushioning its descent with another blast from its jets.  
“Bike,” she reported. “Civilian model. One rider. Headed right for us.”  
“Spread out,” Justin told his lance. It was unlikely that a single biker could carry a bomb big enough to hurt a BattleMech, but then again a year ago it had seemed unlikely that anyone would drop a meteorite on an inhabited city. The impact would likely trigger global cooling severe enough to kill millions; carrying a bomb big enough to destroy four BattleMechs seemed almost trivial by comparison.  
Justin brought his Crusader down on one knee. Better to look them in the eyes, whoever they were.  
It was a girl, perhaps a teenager, head wrapped in a red bandana, goggles over her eyes. Her clothes were dirty, torn and soot-stained. She leapt from the bike as she crested the rise before Justin, staggering towards him before tumbling to the ground.  
“Tennyson’s Valley,” she gasped. “Come quickly.”  
Justin knew the place. It was another small village, just under 20 kilometers away, over the nearest line of hills. “What happened?”  
The girl lifted her goggles and wiped her eyes, smearing her face with dirt. And blood, he saw. And blood. “BattleMechs,” she cried. “They’re destroying the village. Murdering everyone.”  
The Crusader was already up and in motion.

Chinon City

She smoked. They were taking a recess, it was allowed. She’d allow it. So she stood on the balcony outside the conference room, and smoked. There was a garden outside, sheltered within the walls of the ComStar compound, green fields like the softest velvet, a still pond where fat, iridescent fish swam in lazy circles. Beautiful, but it needed constant pruning. A never-ending struggle against nature.  
Beaufort blew a long, hazy stream of smoke.   
A bad habit, one that would probably kill her one day, but then sometimes it seemed that everything in the universe wanted to kill everyone. Heat would kill you and cold would kill you. No sunlight? Dead from vitamin D deficiency. Too much sunlight? Dead from skin cancer. Zero gravity? Murder for your body. Low gravity? Very Bad for the Health Indeed. High gravity? Write your last will and testament now. Or like the two in the conference room: Bandits or the government, it didn’t matter, their guns used the same lead and killed you just as dead.  
“A C-Bill for your thoughts,” Commandant Neville’s voice interrupted her reverie. “A million for your favor.”  
She turned, saw Neville standing a pace behind her, a long-stemmed drink in either hand. “To a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail,” she shook her head, flicked her cigarette over the balcony railing and took one of the drinks. “ComStar’s revenue in a day is more than your territories will produce in a lifetime. You cannot buy your way to success this time, my dear commander.”  
“No? Pity. Would make things easier, not to mention far less dull,” Neville glanced to where Percy stood with his party. They could hear his raven-like tones, indistinct but piercing. “I wonder what ghastly collection of inbred aristocratic genes gave rise to that voice. As pleasant as wet mittens.” Neville gave a mock shudder, then turned back to face Beaufort. “Which makes me curious, Precentor. Your organization has the money, as you point out. Money buys many things, not least of them men. How many would a day’s revenue buy—a battalion of BattleMechs? Two? Maybe even a regiment. If you wanted, you could end this war in a day. Pick a side. Suddenly, that side comes into unexpected wealth, truly a miracle, and then hey presto! Hires enough mercenaries to crush their enemies flatter than an Atlas’s insole. You would do it, easily. Wouldn’t even have to get your hands dirty.”   
There was danger here, Beaufort felt. The man was fumbling at the edges of something greater than he knew. She schooled her face. “Conquest is not what ComStar wants,” she said simply. Well, not the only thing it wanted.   
“No?” Neville’s eyes narrowed. “What is it that you really want?”  
“ComStar has always sought peace.” That was true enough as far as it went, which wasn’t very. Recent thought was the current fighting wasn’t destructive enough; Pencader notwithstanding, economies were recovering, learning was advancing. So, counter-intuitively, the current Primus’s policy was to let all sides rebuild and consolidate—the better to tear each other apart in the next spasm of violence. It sounded dangerous to her—what if real peace was achieved without ComStar?—but then these were matters as remote as Terra, as distant as Blessed Blake’s peace. “On Pencader as on every other world.”  
“Peace can be achieved in many ways.”  
“True peace can only be achieved through negotiation,” she said firmly. “Never by conquest. Violence only begets violence, Commandant.”

Tennyson’s Valley

They could see smoke rising from over the line of hills.  
Justin kicked the throttle out to maximum, sending the Crusader barreling through the forested rise, then over the crest without pause.   
The jouncing view out the ferroglass screen showed a long, narrow valley, dotted with homesteads and farms, veiled by a thick haze of billowing from a dozen fires. His HUD immediately began painting targets, six hostile BattleMechs, ranged in a wide circle around the edge of the village.  
Justin loosed a double salvo of 30 missiles at the nearest ’Mech without waiting for a lock-on, then charged straight down slope. The missiles plunged screaming down, detonating in a fiery shower around the ’Mech—a Locust—blasting off its antenna and one arm, while other warheads blew apart the roof of the house the Locust had been standing in front of.  
“Pull back, JC, pull back!” Chen was shouting at him.  
The Crusader plowed straight through the Locust, snapping it in half at the waist, legs and torso spinning in opposite directions. Plowed through the house on the other side, timbers snapping like toothpicks, walls bursting outwards in a hail of deadly shrapnel. Halting finally on the main road in the middle of town.  
Justin could hear the distant hammering of Chen’s and Jackson’s autocannons, and the snap-hiss of particle cannon fire from White’s Vindicator, echoing and re-echoing down the valley. No time to worry about them. The MAD beeped for his attention, and his HUD painted the outline of a ’Mech bearing down on him. Justin twisted the Crusader to face it.  
“—rounded Justin, you’re gonna get—”  
A scorpion silhouette loomed through the smoke at the far end of the village, parting to reveal a black and white Marauder. Hank Payne, leader of the Game Over Gang. His machine was heavier than the Crusader, but optimized for long-distance slugging. Justin charged forward, pumping out kilojoules of killing energy from each arm laser. He hit the secondary trigger and a dozen missiles corkscrewed in comet trails, slamming into the Marauder’s left arm and leg.   
The Marauder leveled its blocky arms and spat brilliant red and green beams of light, blistering and cracking the armor across the Crusader’s chest. Justin felt a twinge of doubt—Payne had lasers, not particle cannon. Closing wouldn’t give Justin any advantage.  
“—ehind you Jus—”  
Justin slowed his charge, glanced at the 360-degree viewstrip at the top of his display. Just in time to see a Hunchback rounding the corner behind him.  
“Shi—”  
Justin threw the Crusader sideways, lurching behind the town’s church, just as the Hunchback’s massive autocannon roared to life, vomiting a stream of depleted uranium shells. It twisted to track Justin as it fired, blasting craters in the road before striking the church. The church’s clock tower disappeared in a blizzard of fire, every window burst out in a shiny rain of killing shards.  
Justin caught sight of huddled bodies inside the church an instant before the building collapsed in on itself, walls buckling outwards, roof crashing down with a thunderous roar.   
The Hunchback marched through the swirling dust and debris. Its cannon roared again, blasting the Crusader’s torso, forcing Justin to stagger back a step. It shrugged off his answering fire without even a pause.   
“—et out of there Justin!”  
Particle and heavy cannon fire rocked the Hunchback. The lance, buying him time.  
Gritting his teeth, Justin turned the Crusader, and ran.

Chinon City

Precentor Beaufort strolled with Lord Baron Percy through the gardens. She’d been seen talking with Neville; it wouldn’t do to be thought she was showing favoritism, so she’d resigned herself to an hour of having her ears assaulted by Percy’s hectoring.  
Percy had apparently assumed Neville had been pleading his case in private, so the stroll had quickly become Percy’s chance to do the same, by providing a roll-call of every insult and injustice he’d suffered at the Commandant’s hands. Such and such acres burned, such and such farms or villages destroyed, such and such tons of production lost.   
She had to physically restrain herself from rolling her eyes.  
That was the struggle’s only real accomplishment, she decided: to reduce human suffering to statistics and banality, to make nightmares routine, to make hell boring.   
The popularity of movements like Neville’s continued to amaze her. Well, perhaps if one was fighting for or against the Combine or Confederation, where occupation might mean the end of a way of life, it might be understandable, but what other than perverse tribalism could convince ordinary people to fight to the death for or against the Commonwealth or League? Neither were especially corrupt or oppressive, indeed both granted their worlds a degree of autonomy—or rather, granted the ruling nobility of each world autonomy—as well as economic freedom. For the average inhabitant, switching from Steiner to Marik would mean a different face on the currency and little else.  
And yet, ‘Commandant’ Neville and the Free League Revolutionary Brigade, and a dozen other groups like it, had spent a decade fighting one of the ugliest, messiest, bloodiest wars in the Sphere—and this was saying something: the little trick of dropping a meteorite on an inhabited city had won Pencader’s insurrection its own sordid, squalid place in the history books—in order to do precisely that.  
“He used to be one of us, you know.”  
Beaufort blinked a little. What had they been talking about? “Who?”  
“Neville. Used to be part of the nobility: The third son of a minor lord,” Percy sniffed. “His revolutionary awakening, by miraculous coincidence, ended with the death of his two older brothers and himself in control of the ancestral lands. Make no mistake Precentor, this rebellion is about nothing more than personal power and gain.”  
“And your rejection of the Brigade’s demands is entirely principled and altruistic, is it?”  
“No need to look so smug, Precentor. They would hang me and my family, as well you know. And then keep every one of our policies in place. That is the reality of the situation.”  
She halted, turned to face him and put her hands on her hips. “Very well, Lord Baron, you wish to talk of the reality of the situation, let us talk of the reality of the situation. You haven’t the strength to beat Neville, or to hold his lands against a hostile population even if by some miracle you did. Nor, for all his boasting, can he topple you. All you can accomplish is to bleed each other white until someone stronger comes along and crushes you both under their heel.”  
A nice little speech, she congratulated herself. If only the leaders of the five Great Houses had heard it. Oh, who was she kidding: Katrina Steiner, Janos Marik and all the rest knew perfectly well how impossible the dream of reunification was—their power rested on their claim to the mantle of First Lord. Give that up, and rebellion would soon follow. It would take a power far greater than any of theirs to unit humanity. Ah, but that was a dream for another day.  
Percy frowned. “There is the principle—”  
“Stuff the principle.” She was starting to enjoy this. “You said yourself, all that matters is power. Allow him his, preserve yours.”  
The Baron’s face was troubled. “I will think on this.”  
“Don’t think too long. Your people are dying, Baron.”

Tennyson’s Valley

The lance pulled back behind the ridge.  
White used her jets to pop up just high enough to scan the other side, then drop back down as laser fire arced overhead, scything through the air she’d just occupied.  
“Looks like they’re falling back, too,” she reported. “It’s a terror raid, guess they don’t have the stomach for a stand-up fight.”  
Justin felt he would scream. “We can’t let them go.”  
“Justin,” Chen broke in. “They’ve still got five ’Mechs to our four: Payne’s Marauder, that Hunchback, a Rifleman, a Griffin and an Assassin. We can keep the pressure on, stop them from burning any more towns, but no way we can take them all on.”  
Justin was shaking his head in his cockpit. “No, no, goddamn it, no. Not when we’ve finally caught up to the bastards. We aren’t fighting just to let those murderers go.”  
“Well, what is it that we are fighting for?” asked Chen.  
“Peace,” answered Justin. “And justice.”  
“And if peace meant letting Payne and the Gang escape justice?”  
“I’d rather die.”   
“Sorry to interrupt.” White spoke up. “Got an idea though, JC. Share nav data?”  
“Let’s hear it.” Justin tapped his console so the lance could access shared map data.  
“Looks like the Gang is following the valley back to Neville’s territory. Which means they’re going to make a big loop, just here.” A blue icon appeared over a bend in the river valley. “If we cut straight across the hills, we can beat them to Tennyson’s Cut, right here.” Another icon, red this time.   
Justin smiled grimly. “An ambush.”  
“It’s a narrow defile, they’ll be moving single file,” White went on. “You take out the lead, we take out the rearguard, then the other three are trapped and we pick ‘em apart at our leisure.”  
Justin rammed his fist into his open palm. “Perfect.” At last, they would have justice. At last, they would get revenge.

Chinon City

“Years of bloodshed have achieved nothing,” Beaufort said. She looked at Percy. “The time has come, gentlemen, for you to admit to yourselves that you will never gain redress for what you think you have lost.” Turned to Neville. “Nor will you ever receive what you think you can gain.”  
“The status quo then,” murmured Percy. “And what of those who have died? What am I to tell their families? That they died for nothing? What about those who lost their homes? That they can never go back?”  
“And where is it written that every man’s death must have meaning?” Beaufort’s smile was sympathetic, but her eyes, hard. “This gentlemen, is the real price of peace: Letting go the past, and of your grudges.”  
The room was silent. The two men looked at one another, unblinking. Aides shuffled papers, one coughed uncomfortably.  
“Very well, Precentor,” Percy said at last. “Very well. We accept the terms. We will recognize the legitimacy and autonomy of Neville’s holdings, in return for his oath to do the same for ours. The border to be overseen by ComStar observers. We shall have peace.” Percy cut off her smile with a raised finger, aimed at Neville. “Though I warn you, we will be vigilant in case this is a trick. Anything less than the immediate withdrawal of Commandant Neville’s forces will mean the resumption of war.”  
Neville gave an exaggerated shrug. “We will not be the first to break the cease-fire,” he said. “I expect safe passage for my men. Any attempt to hinder or harm them will also mean war.”  
Percy gestured to an aide, whispered fiercely in his ear. The aide hurried from the room.

Tennyson’s Valley

The magnetic anomaly detector beeped for Justin’s attention. “Here they come. Minimum sensor profiles everyone, let them put their heads in the noose.”  
The five ’Mechs of the Game Over Gang entered the defile, the Marauder in the lead.  
Justin toggled the comm channel.  
“Mortimer Command, this is Hound One,” Justin reported. “Raiding force has been acquired. Preparing to engage.”  
He centered the reticle on the Marauder, holding over the bulbous canopy on the machine’s snout. Held it there until the crosshairs turned gold. Thumbed the missile bay doors, felt more than heard the vibration as the servos retracted the covers. He mentally pictured the missiles waiting in their racks, coiled like hounds before the hunt.  
Chen, Jackson and White in position on the other side of the valley. Just a few more seconds. This time there would be no escape.  
“Hound One, this is Mortimer Command. Stand down, Lieutenant Crowe, stand down. That is an order, straight from Lord Baron Percy,” a voice barked from the commset. “Do you hear me, Crowe? It’s peace, thank god. At long last, it’s peace. Stand down.”  
Justin stared at the speaker set into the control panel, as though trying to catch sight of the words that came tumbling out of it. He glanced at the holo emitter beside it, and smiled sadly to himself. Peace? One hand reached out, almost as though of its own accord, and closed the channel.   
Then it keyed the lance channel.  
“Fire.”


End file.
